The Yes, Chef! Final Four Share Martha & José's Influence on Their Evolutions: "Nice to Be Human"
Chefs Emily Brubaker, Jake Lawler, Lee Frank, and Zain Ismail talk about what got them into the Final Four on Yes, Chef! Season 1.
The student/mentor challenge in Episode 8, "The Pursuit of Perfect,” whittled the Yes, Chef! kitchen down to a Final Four: Chefs Emily Brubaker, Jake Lawler, Lee Frank, and Zain Ismail.
It was the Final Four they actually hoped would end up together, as all four chefs made it through each week without being sent home, having experienced the grind together from Episode 1.
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In our NBC Insider sitdown with the four chefs, they revealed how hosts José Andrés and Martha Stewart impacted them in this competition and how the student chef/mentor challenge allowed them to temper their worst impulses to help the next generation in ways that would encourage them to give this difficult and challenging career a try.
The advice from Martha Stewart and José Andrés that made a difference
All 12 chefs invited to compete in the first season of Yes, Chef! walked into the set with excellent culinary skills but plenty of personal peccadillos holding them back from their best selves in the kitchen and their personal lives.
As the weeks have gone by, the Final Four have all gotten the opportunity to interact and get personal feedback from José Andrés and Martha Stewart, who have been through it all as chefs, business people, and celebrities. Asked if anything they were told by either host impacted how they approached this competition for the better, all four shared a moment that they said made a difference.
Chef Jake shared that in the last couple of episodes, Chef José had a repeated message for him: “He kept telling me, 'You know that you can push harder, and I know that you can push harder.' Just hearing that from someone like José Andrés is like, 'If he knows I can, then I definitely can.' It helped not only push me harder in the show, but pushed me harder when I got home too."
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For Chef Zain, she shared something that hasn’t been featured in the show yet: She lost her father in 2020, and she was able to talk about it with Chef José.
"He had given me such good advice as he had a similar story with his mother,” she shared. “The way he maneuvered that, it really helped me. This whole competition brings out the best and the worst in you. Every day wasn't a great day for me mentally so just hearing Chef José going through something like that too, and going through his life working on that and building mentally through that is something that definitely inspired me and reminds me that it's possible. I can work through these things and find success at the end of the day."
In Chef Lee’s case, he had two moments.
"A lot of times, we're serving these dishes and then we walk away, so we don't hear what they have to say after,” Chef Lee said of delivering meals to the judges. “But there’s a moment in one of the first few episodes where, when I serve them in the dining room and when I leave, José looks at Martha and goes, 'This guy knows how to cook.' Like, that was all I ever wanted out of this show. José Andrés is literally on my Mount Rushmore of living chefs."
But he said he also remembers in the second episode when both judges did not enjoy his fennel Ceaser salad and let him know.
"I remember going back to my hotel room that night and literally having one of those moments where I looked in the mirror and I was, like, 'What the f--- are you doing? I know I can cook better than that. I just need to be me and if cooking my food sends me home, then cooking my food sends me home,’” he said of how he turned himself around.
"And I feel the next episode until where we are now, I just went for it,” he continued. "Anytime I questioned anything or felt like I needed to hold back, I went back to that comment and I was doing everything [in] my power to not get that comment again."
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Last but not least, Chef Emily said Martha and José's light demeanor throughout every day was infectious and stabilizing when things got tough in the kitchen.
"José and Martha have a lot of humor, and their jokes, their little winks, their smiles, really kept me going,” she said of their efforts to make eye contact, give smiles of encouragement, or even tell jokes. "José really wanted to understand who we were and what we were about. The mentorship part was much more internal but it was also just like, 'We're normal people,' and they're really just normal people. It brought it away from all the stress for me. It was nice to be human with people."
The student chef challenge: "OK, maybe I did learn something through it all."
To quote Chef Zain, as soon as the five chefs were told that their best dish would be cooked by a culinary student in Episode 8: “My heart pretty much dropped.”
However, the exercise ended up being transformative for all of them as they really lived up to the thesis of the series: Can you be a better chef and a better person when tasked to do so?
"It's not because I pulled MVC, but I think it was literally one of the best episodes they've aired yet,” Chef Lee said. "It seems like the show finally caught up with its purpose. You know, I've had a lot of people watch the first few episodes and ask, like, 'Well, where is this mentorship part?' And I think some of it was kind of the Mr. Miyagi, 'Go paint the fences and clean the cars,’” he said of the Karate Kid Sensei's oblique teaching technique. "And then all of a sudden you get to Episode 8, and you get through it, and you're like, 'OK, maybe I did learn something through it all.’"
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The cheerleader style executed by Chef Emily and Chef Jake came from their shared workstation.
"The two of us were kind of feeding off of each other with our students, who are both amazing students," Chef Emily said. "Being in the top five was pretty much a reward, as it is. I just was like, 'If the student is what gets me out, then it's on [my] teaching.' I'm a mom, and obviously that plays a big role in everything I do and how I mentor my teams and my family. So having fun and being a little ridiculous was where we needed to go. Sometimes you have to let go and have a little bit more fun to be able to get the outcome you want."
Chef Jake agreed and said, "Working next to Chef Emily in that challenge was extremely helpful for me. I'm not always the most nurturing, but I was able to feed off it like Emily said. You could see it in my face when they told us they were gonna have culinary students, that I wasn't super excited about it whatsoever. But real quickly, once we started getting into the challenge, I found myself caring about this kid that I had never met before, which was kind of weird.
"It didn't make the episode, but they had asked us at one point, 'Do you want to kick your culinary student out of here?'" he added. "But I was ready to go home over that because I wanted to give the student the chance to put up the food that we were going to put together. Back in the day, I would have thrown that person out of there and said, 'Yeah, this is mine. Sit down, please.'"
As for Zain, who wasn’t thrilled with the final plating of her dish, she said it was ultimately worth doing a cook-off for her place in the Final Four.
"My flavors are left field, so I was nervous about having a student do my techniques and my flavors. And then as soon as I asked her and she said she was Trinidad and Jamaican, and then she told me she was 18 years old and it was her first year of culinary school, I mentally took a step back real quick,” she said. "She reminds me of myself. I'm always the youngest in the kitchen, and as a young female, I wanted to do the best I could to coach her. But we also got the anger issues that we working on at the same place. So it was a kind of mixture of holding my anger back; still being a good teacher, but then also dealing with her nerves too because I want her to be the best that she can be."
New episodes of Yes, Chef! premiere on Mondays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC. Each episode will be available to stream on Peacock the next day.
